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<title>  Wisconsin Week Article </title>
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<h1>
UW Researchers Ride Supercomputing's New Wave
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<p>
by Brian Mattmiller, Wisconsin Week, November 16, 1994, p. 12
<hr>

<p>
MADISON - A new generation of supercomputers capable of solving
staggeringly complex problems -- from mapping the human genome to designing
new drugs -- is being advanced by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison
scientists.
<p>
A $2.4 million federal grant awarded this fall to a UW-Madison
computer science group places the university at the forefront of research
into parallel supercomputing. The three-year grant from the Department of
Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) will help the UW-Madison
team develop new computers that are faster and more adept at organizing
vast volumes of data.
<p>
The grant brings UW-Madison's total federal support in this area to
$4.5 million.
<p>
Parallel supercomputers operate by using many processors to work
simultaneously on a single complex problem, where a conventional
supercomputer uses only a few. The processor is a computer's mathematical
engine, and the new parallel machines can have literally thousands of them
working in tandem on specialized tasks.
<p>
The end result: Parallel computers can solve problems once too
large for conventional computers.
<p>
"In parallel computing, speed is the only thing that matters," said
Barton Miller, a computer science professor and one of four investigators
in the project. "Your customers are people who have really big problems,
where millions of computations per second is not enough. You're trying to
reach billions."
<p>
Researchers Miller, Mark Hill, James Larus and David Wood, all
computer science faculty, have two different projects in the works,
nicknamed
<!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~paradyn/">"Paradyn"</A>
<!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~wwt/">"Wisconsin Wind Tunnel".</A>
Paradyn focuses primarily
on increasing computer speed by developing tools that will automatically
isolate the slowest parts of a program, and give a programmer precise
information of the cause of the slow-down.
<p>
Wisconsin Wind Tunnel, a name which alludes to the wind tunnels
used in aeronautics simulation, aims at developing a model to simulate new
ideas in parallel computer software and hardware without the expense of
building a prototype.
<p>
"We're trying to change the computers that parallel computing
vendors will be selling in five years," said Hill. "We can make them
faster, make the processors interact more effectively and make the software
more reliable."
<p>
Parallel computers are already doing remarkable things in
laboratories and industry. Miller said American Express has a parallel
computer that offers lightning-fast profiles of customer spending patterns
and serves as an early-warning system for credit card theft.
<p>
The computer can analyze receipt patterns, and notify the company
of any radical changes in a customer's spending. That's often a red flag
for credit card theft. With a follow-up call to clients, the company has
been able to alert customers before they realize their card's been stolen,
he said.
<p>
American Express is using the same model of computer UW-Madison
owns -- a Thinking Machines model CM-5, which when purchased in 1991 was
one of the fastest in the world.
<p>
The research applications are equally sprawling. Parallel computing
could provide a timely breakthrough in sequencing the human genome, which
is comprised of some 3 billion distinct chemical bases. It also can be used
to greatly increase local precision in global weather forecasting.
<p>
Miller uses an employee metaphor to describe the drawback of
parallel computing -- getting all the processors to operate in sync. If an
office of 100 employees must meet continually to keep everyone fully
informed on a project, the work will take that much longer to complete.
<p>
"The inefficiency of the organization grows along with the number
of people who need to communicate," Miller said.
<p>
Likewise, the more processors one adds to parallel computers, the
less efficient they become. Miller said the research is focusing on ways to
make each processor function more independently of the others, while still
sharing memory.
<p>
Their solution is called "fine-grain distributed shared memory,"
which, plainly put, allows each part of the computer to quickly share data
from other processors. This advance creates the illusion that each
processor contains memory for the entire computer.
<p>
Although cost puts the technology out of reach for most businesses
and research efforts, the UW-Madison group is also looking at developing
more affordable variations on the theme. A technology called "Cluster of
Workstations" (COW) would allow companies with work stations or networked
personal computers to run parallel software, without the costs of a new
system.
<p>
"Parallel computing will not succeed with just the existence of
these big machines," Hill said. "Automobiles wouldn't have succeeded if all
we made were Ferraris. We have to provide the Chevrolets as well."
<p>
<hr>
For more information, see:
<ul>
<li> <!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~paradyn/">Paradyn Home Page</A>
<li> <!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~wwt/">Wisconsin Wind Tunnel Home Page</A>
</ul>
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